Alex Gibney portrays Steve Jobs as a modern-day Citizen Kane, a man with dazzling talent and monomaniacal focus, but utterly lacking in empathy

Having tackled the Scientologists in his most recent film Going Clear, documentary maker Alex Gibney takes on a cult that is even more ardent, and with considerably more members – that of Apple. His unsparing portrait of Steve Jobs will prove extremely displeasing to devotees, but it’s a riveting and important corrective to the myths Jobs helped to propagate, ...

The film points out that Jobs’s genius was in personalising computers – Lisa being the first – but it also reveals that this impulse came from a pretty messed-up place. As well as being deeply ambivalent about being a father, Jobs also felt at once rejected and anointed by the fact that he was adopted. Jobs has somehow transmitted that mess to us too. Our iPhones connect us to faraway friends and family, yet we spend increasing amounts of time alone with them, seduced by machines that can never really fulfil us.

Gibney’s film concludes that Jobs had the monomaniacal focus of a monk but none of the empathy of one, and it makes a powerful case. Jobs’s was an astonishing life of such significance that it will probably be studied for centuries, and Gibney does not downplay his genius. Yet the kernel of the film is probably the ex-girlfriend who says that Job “blew it”. How so? Jobs achieved things that the vast majority of us would never dream of. Yet Gibney’s film forensically anatomises the contradictions, the ruthlessness, and the pointlessly crappy behaviour that reveal Apple’s ideals to be a sham, even while the products themselves continue to prove almost irresistible.

Maybe I will have to watch the movie. The man did have his flaws, but does this movie really concentrate on an ex-girlfriend badmouthing him for lacking empathy?

3 comments:

I have never understood the pseudo-nerd fascination with Jobs. He didn't do anything innovative. He simply marketed a well made product (iPod), and followed it up with line after line of well made products, and found a way to get these expensive products into the average households. He might of been a genius, but it wasn't as a tech. Blackberry and Palm had already made devices that did exactly what the original iPhone did and more.

Name one titan of an industry who is guided by empathy, and I will name them the luckiest man alive. It is seeing the weaknesses of others and exploiting them that drives multi-billion dollar companies. If he was empathetic, we wouldn't be talking about Apple today, but some other company that Apple demolished before anyone knew who they were.

Designing and getting off the ground the worlds first personal computer, and computer company, that all other pc companies imitated = not innovative. The first human UI guidelines that all software companies followed = not innovative. Putting together and designing the first human UI to the market at an affordable price = not innovative.Designing the first computers and human UI that lead to the modern the internet (hypercode = html, NeXt lan protocols = https) = not innovative. Taking a small 3D content and hardware company and turning it into a world wide smash, Pixar = not innovative. Taking a beleaguered pioneer company such as Apple in the early 90’s back out of the ditch and turning into the richest company in the world = not innovative. Completely revolutionizing the mobile phone business and turning it into the biggest financial success the world has seen in a century - that all other companies imitate = not innovative.....etc. etc. etc.There is something seriously wrong with your brain.